Published in LiP Magazine
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HOTEL RWANDA
Director: Terry George
United Artists 2005

Reviewed by Jeff Conant
06.21.05

When I first learned that a film had been made about the Rwandan genocide, I was convinced that the movie would be a minor disaster about a major tragedy. It turned out I liked the film, and I’ll tell you why soon enough. But first, a riddle: What’s the difference between the 1994 massacre in Rwanda and the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean?

Answer: Who cares?

That is to say, the great disasters—the really massive cataclysms that leave the incredible stench of death, whether human-made or “natural”—enter history largely according to who cares, how they care, and what effect their caring may have on the aftermath of the disaster. In the case of the tsunami, a natural disaster (made worse, as natural disasters are, by the poverty of its victims), relief came in the form of many thousands of concerned individuals and organizations wanting to help. This was accompanied by an elaborate dog and pony show to boost the moral high ground of governments and aid agencies whose moral high ground needed boosting. (As Condoleezza Rice, newly sworn in as secretary of state, said, the tsunami “presents a great opportunity for America to show we care.”) At best, governments and aid agencies learn lessons about how to prevent, mitigate, and face similar tragedies in the future. At worst, such events present opportunities for grand-scale hypocrisy, fatten the bank accounts of the aid agencies, and generate conflicts at the site of the disaster that far outlast the immediate impacts. (In Sri Lanka they say they don’t know which tsunami was worse, the natural tsunami that came first or the tsunami of aid that followed.)

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda—which left three times as many corpses and carried on for months before it was given any meaningful attention from world media and governments—generated no such response. Hotel Rwanda well articulates the political reality that nobody cares about Africa, or about the fate of poor people anywhere. In one of the movie’s well-timed and carefully scripted moments of outrage, Colonel Oliver (Nick Nolte), an overstressed UN blue helmet trying to follow orders, tells Paul Rusesabagina, the lead character played by Don Cheadle, “You know why they won’t help you? Because you’re black. In fact, you’re worse than black. You’re African.”

In 1994, Rwanda, a nation of 6 million people, was about 85% Hutu and 15% Tutsi. The two groups speak the same language and share the same culture. Belgian colonial rulers had established a policy of favoritism toward the Tutsis (who happened to be tall and thin and better meet European criteria of physical superiority) over the short and stocky Hutus, placing Tutsis in positions of power. When Rwanda won independence in 1962, a Hutu dictatorship took over, polarizing the state and blaming Tutsis for everything wrong with the newly liberated nation. Thirty-two years of troubled peace and intermittent conflict later, on April 6, 1994, a plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down over the capital city of Kigali. Hutu extremists blamed Tutsi rebels, and within hours the streets filled with Hutu militia known as the Interahamwe, or “those who work together.” This is where Hotel Rwanda begins.

Goaded into action by furious calls for blood from Hutu-controlled radio stations, the Interahamwe attacked the Tutsi business and political elite. They very soon turned to ordinary Tutsi citizens, whom they called “cockroaches.” Within weeks the Rwandan countryside was awash with blood. Local officials ordered Hutu peasants to kill their Tutsi neighbors. Hutus who refused were murdered themselves. At its peak, the genocide claimed 8,000 lives per day.

The international community ignored Rwanda’s horrors. Under the Geneva Convention, charges of genocide oblige the world community to intervene, and so—as Hotel Rwanda poignantly shows—officials from the UN, Europe, and the Clinton administration studiously avoided the label. Outside of Rwanda, the massacres were portrayed as a sudden outburst of tribal hatred, which further relieved the West of responsibility. The New York Times called it “an epic struggle between two rival ethnic groups” in which “no one’s hands are clean.”
In his beautifully written book on the topic, We Regret To Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, Phillip Gourevitch tells us, “It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and it was carried out with machetes.” Like the horrific technology of the suicide bomber or the shocking transformation of passenger planes into killing machines, the Rwandan massacre painfully illustrates the cynical slogan of the National Rifle Association, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Well, in point of fact, guns help, but the lesson of Rwanda (and of Iraq and Palestine and Darfur and Bosnia) is that where there is desperation, rage, and a political will to kill, people will use any means at their disposal to do so. The question is, why?

It’s a question that Hotel Rwanda, for all its gripping plot, cinematic clarity, gruesome and compelling human drama, and its beautiful depiction of one man’s transformation from a mostly self-serving materialist to the self-sacrificing savior of thousands, fails to ask. To director Terry George’s credit, the movie avoids easy answers in just the way a good, gripping political drama should; unfortunately for the politically minded viewer, Hotel Rwanda does it mostly by avoiding hard questions.

While Hotel Rwanda fails to describe the local and global politics that led to the Rwandan genocide and the continuing wars in central Africa, or to explore how it was, perhaps, the inevitable release of decades of subterranean violence propagated and perpetuated by the colonial occupation, it does look critically at the utter lack of political will that allowed the massacre to proceed uninterrupted. For this alone, with an eye to the current crises around the globe, the film is worth seeing.

When the first footage of the massacre is filmed by an anxious foreign journalist, Paul, the film’s hero, urges that the footage be aired on the evening news in Europe as soon as possible. The cameraman who captured the footage, half-drunk and embittered, asks what good this will do. “They’ll watch the killing on the evening news,” he states, “and they’ll say ‘that’s horrible.’ And then they’ll turn around and enjoy their dinner.”

In her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others, the late Susan Sontag examined the ways photographic representations of war and atrocity engage us, impassion us, and incite us to action—or don’t. After examining the cultural traces left by photos of Nazi death camps, atomic blasts, napalmed children, and other all-too-common horrors, she turns her gaze toward the total effect of this steady diet of horror. “As everyone has observed,” Sontag writes, “there is a mounting level of acceptable violence and sadism in mass culture: films, television, comics, computer games. Imagery that would have had audiences cringing and recoiling in disgust forty years ago is watched without so much as blink by every teenager in the multiplex.” But, she insists, it is not that we simply become immune to the power of these images. “People don’t become inured to what they are shown because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.” In other words, it is not the sheer volume of horrors that leaves us too often numb and frustrated. It is our inability, or refusal, to act in response to what we see. Like a muscle atrophied by lack of exercise or a neural pathway deadened due to lack of mental discipline, the ethical sensibility that might otherwise impel each and every one of us to do something to prevent harm to our fellow creatures grows palsied due to consistent negligence.

The story of Hotel Rwanda is one of personal salvation amidst mass horror and of moral fortitude amidst social collapse. The film makes the massacre not unbearable by focusing on the quiet courage and calm heroism of Paul and his family. The strategy could have easily rung hollow, but it works, at least in part because this is in fact a true story being told. Paul, the concierge at the Milles Collines Hotel, used what little power and influence he had gained through years of service to turn the hotel into a safe zone for hundreds of Tutsis fleeing the violence. This oasis of safety is one of the main settings for the film, and there is a certain poetic justice in seeing a five-star hotel for European tourists transformed into a refugee camp, with women collecting water from the swimming pool while mortar fire rains into the compound. Hotel Rwanda is also a story of the failure of human rights. When Paul urges all of the refugees in the hotel to call and fax everyone they know outside of Rwanda for help, his message is direct: “We must shame them into saving us.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t help.

Though the film obliquely situates the massacre as a legacy of colonial exploitation, how such a history leads from the bitterness of internalized oppression to the terrible catharsis of mass murder, and why colonized people so often turn genocidal (think of working class Wiemar-period Germans after their humiliating defeat in World War I or the anti-Arab ferocity of post-holocaust Zionism), are questions worth pondering. Otherwise history is sure to repeat itself.
Such acts of mass violence show the ineluctable course of history in redressing violence with violence. Primo Levi, the Italian author and holocaust survivor, wrote in Survival in Auschwitz in 1958, “If there is one thing sure in this world, it is certainly this: that it will not happen to us a second time.” However, after witnessing the events of the rest of the century, he was forced to revise his opinion. In his 1986 Book, The Drowned and the Saved, he writes: “It happened; therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.”

Coming soon to a theater near you: Hotel Sudan, Hotel Chechnya, Hotel Ache, Hotel Palestine, Hotel Bosnia….

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